2014 Rice Oil & Gas HPC

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Numerical simulation of reservoirs is an integral part of commercial development studies to optimize petroleum recovery. Modern petroleum reservoir simulation requires simulating detailed and computationally expensive geological and physical models. Parallel reservoir simulators have the potential to solve larger, more realistic problems than previously possible. To make the solution of these large problems feasible, an efficient parallel implementation of the algorithm is necessary. Such a parallelization of the algorithm requires proper data structures and data layout, parallel direct and iterative solvers, and parallel preconditioners. Load balancing and minimization of communication between processors also plays very important role in achieving that goal. In this talk, we investigate parallel performance for black oil reservoir simulation on multiple massively parallel computing architectures. A deliberate strategy of performance-based development of the major types of computations encountered in reservoir simulation programs is employed. Even though most operations are memory-bandwidth bound, it is possible with careful implementation, to get excellent parallel efficiency to several 1000s of cores. We discuss numerical issues, scalability and parallel efficiency of reservoir simulator on several very large and geologically challenging examples.